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Romney spoke to Chris Wallace on Fox News about something Romney has just discovered: There was a “passion gap” in the last election between Republicans and Democrats.

Anybody who watched the Republican and the Democratic conventions last year saw a big difference in enthusiasm. As I also wrote last year, at campaign speech after campaign speech, people would shout out, “We love you!” to Barack Obama, but I never heard anybody shout that out to Mitt Romney.

This caught Romney totally by surprise on Election Day. “You know, we certainly had the passion coming from our side, and I don’t think we were as aware of the passion that was coming from the other side,” Romney said. “I think we were a little blindsided by that.”

So what can CPAC and the Republican Party learn from this? It might learn that passion counts. It might also learn, as I have written repeatedly, that the more likable candidate almost always wins the presidency.

That is a pretty broad field ranging from wacky to serious, so why is Chris Christie barred from it? Because he is a Republican governor in a Democratic state and has an approval rating of 74 percent, that’s why.

As a Republican actually attracting Democrats and independents, he is suspect in the eyes of conservatives.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that CPAC was showing a “suicidal death wish” by snubbing Christie and that it “writes off CPAC as a serious force.”

“If you can’t accept Chris Christie as a conservative, then you’re really just asking for another election loss in 2016,” King said. “And it makes us look crazy in the eyes of the American people.”

But King misreads his party. To many hard-core Republicans, the party has wasted nomination after nomination on wishy-washy mock conservatives who are not true believers and who are not willing to drink the Kool-Aid.